Peter Thiel: If I'd Known, I Would Never Have Started PayPal

PayPal co-founder, Facebook billionaire and general Silicon
Valley demigod Peter Thiel gave an interview to
CapLinked, a company he invested in.

He talks about the college bubble and his history but the thing
that's most striking is the fact that he said that if he had
known everything he now knows about the payments industry before
starting PayPal, he would never have tried to do it, because of
how many difficulties there are in the space.

Thiel co-founded PayPal, took it public and then sold it for $1.5
billion to eBay.

It's a nice testament to the power of innovators just doing
something they believe in and trying to figure it out from there.
All of the experts would have predicted PayPal to be a failure,
and they would have been "right" on paper.

He also talks about his decision to become the first outside
investor in Facebook. The two things that stuck out for him about
Facebook were: a) the fact that this was the first site where
people logged in with their real identities, and so it had the
potential to be an identity layer for the web, and b) the scale
of Mark Zuckerberg's vision. That's what got him to invest.